There’s a lucky dip quality to Tete a Tete – London’s annual opera festival made up exclusively of new works. Plunge your hand into the 2018 programme and you might come up with shows about Marie Stopes or Ruth Ellis, an “immersive sci-fi fashion presentation”, “techno tone poem” or a “cosmic dissemination opera” (your guess is as good as mine). There’s a fearlessness, a generosity to this mongrel upstart festival that refuses to limit itself, that bets heavily on new talent and asks its audience to do the same.
But if you’re not the gambling type, one show that’s an absolutely safe bet is the outstanding Mary’s Hand. This beautifully crafted, one-woman chamber opera by writer Di Sherlock and composer Martin Bussey invites the audience into the court and mind of Mary Tudor – an English monarch who has been as poorly served by the opera house as she has by history.
Heretic-burning and religious zealotry don’t make for an easy heroine, and Sherlock’s libretto confronts the contradictions and challenges of the queen head-on, giving us a woman by turns coquettish, vicious and brutally resilient. Bussey’s music by contrast – scored, evocatively, for the unusual forces of trumpet, oboe/cor anglais and cello, and faultlessly played by Heidi Bennett, Clare Hoskins and Gabriella Swallow – softens Mary’s edges, setting her public persona (bright, brittle trumpet fanfares) against the yielding lyricism of her inner life (expansive cello writing).
At the centre of it all, holding the stage with girlish, flickering fingers and a pitiless thrust of the chin is mezzo-soprano Clare McCaldin’s Mary. McCaldin is an outstanding singing-actress, catching and shaping the shifting moods of a show whose episodic, aleatoric structure mirrors the eddying political currents of this most uncertain period in English history.
Elegant, thoughtful, current without being gimmicky and immaculately presented, Mary’s Hand is a 70-minute rebuke to the UK’s major opera companies. When you think of some of the baggy, ill-conceived and cynically presented dross they’ve given us in the name of new opera recently (and the money they’ve thrown at it), and compare it to this modest gem of a show, it’s enough to turn anyone to operatic zealotry and score-burning.
